ARTICLETo Mourn, To Re-imagine Without Oneself: Death, Dying, and Social Media/tion

Stuart J. Murray
Carelton University stuart.murray@carleton.ca

Deborah Lynn Steinberg (deceased)
University of Warwick

“Death’s in the good-bye.”
—Anne Sexton

I. On Repudiations

First, a word about the genesis of the text you are reading, which
departs from several academic conventions for the essay form, and not
least from the conventions of co-authorship. Several days before her
death, and knowing she would not live to write the essay she had
promised for this special issue, Deborah Lynn Steinberg emailed me to
ask if I would be willing to co-author this piece with her ─ in her
case, as we both knew then, posthumously. It would be our final
collaboration, an essay incorporating and reflecting on her blog, which
was live for about one year: from January 2016 to January 2017, but
most actively from mid-September 2016.1
According to her own blogged words, a few months earlier, this
posthumous collaboration is not what she had originally envisaged,
either in form or in content: Catalyst
got back to me today to ask me to submit an abstract for the special
issue. I didn’t expect that. So I need to think on it now. What to
propose. What I might be able to do. It was a nice letter. I’d like to
think of something. Not this blog, but maybe some kind of sequential
short essays on the topics they list (24 October 2016).

Not this blog. At the time of her request to me, I reflected back on
these blogged words and projected the untimely future from which I now
write, imagining my friend who was then still alive from a future in
which she would not be. A discomfiting temporality this, but I agreed
in part because I was and still am reluctant to end our conversations
and collaborations. And, I confess, at that moment, and in others
preceding it, my grief yielded to guilt, for I was mourning someone not
yet dead. In the grip of this presentiment, it was little solace to
know that when we mourn, we mourn a future ─ our future together ─ that
will be taken from us, and irrevocably transformed, when someone we
love dies. That future “is not owed to us,” as Deborah once quipped in
her disarming way, yet its voices call to us, prevail upon us with a
spectral presence. And if not owed to me, or to us, I felt a keen debt
to that future, something I was destined to owe but not own.

Judith Butler offers a wonderful account of such interrelationality and
loss in a text that Deborah herself invoked, as you’ll see below.
Butler writes: “It is not as if an ‘I’ exists independently over here
and then simply loses a ‘you’ over there, especially if the attachment
to ‘you’ is part of what composes who ‘I’ am. If I lose you, under
these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss but I become
inscrutable to myself” (Butler, 2004, p. 22). I write, then, in and
from a certain inscrutability. A form of ghost-writing, if you will. My
tone is personal, at times more so than makes me comfortable, but this
is an extension of our conversations, Deborah’s and mine, and I find
myself caught in my own repudiation of loss. Perhaps all authorship is
co-authorship, and all writing a reckoning with the transitivity of
death. I wouldn’t be the first to say or feel such things.

“We live in a culture that repudiates death,” Deborah would write on
the occasion of David Bowie’s passing, “even as it is cultivated
through public policy ─ austerity is nothing if not a harbinger of
social excommunication and lonely death. In public conversation, death
is frequently discussed as an existential wrong (no child should die of
…), or as ‘giving up’, or as a ‘lost battle’” (Steinberg, 2016).

The sad strange irony of our time is that death is at once cultivated ─
by capital, the military, the police, public policy, in the name of
security and “life” itself ─ and morally repudiated as one’s own singular failure to go on living, sometimes despite oneself. The pervasive idiomatics of survival, Deborah posted on her blog, emblematized
as a heroic figuration ─ the indefatigable warrior of cancer
survivalism. I see this as a cult, an insistent fantasy of the will ─
an offering, quid pro quo of willing life so as to have it (11 January 2016).
Life: as indefatigable survival, and as cultish “body-affective
imperatives of will, affect, and action” (Steinberg, 2017, p. 149). In
Deborah’s terms, these constitute an imperative field, a biopolitics of
heroic livingness, but also an insistent phantasy ─ a latent wish, a
cultural unconscious ─ that we are somehow immortal, that we will cheat
death, that it will not come for me. The pronominal shift from we to me
here is no mistake. Rather, it frames our question, a problem of
singularity that is mine as much as ─ and by virtue of what is ─ ours,
in writing, in public conversation, and in the spaces of social
excommunication and lonely death. I am alone in this. Even though I’m not (23 October 2016).

David Bowie’s death was a private-public event considered by many as
untimely, sudden, unforeseen, for us if not for him. In her short
published piece, Deborah reflects on her earlier work theorizing the
phenomenon of public mourning that had marked, spectacularly, the
prosaic death of Princess Diana (see Kear & Steinberg, 1999). She
had argued then, she writes, that the public intimacies of mourning
celebrity deaths such as Bowie’s or Diana’s “could stand in for more
personal losses, or create moments of unexpected catharsis and
identification with those things about which we cannot bring ourselves
to speak” (Steinberg, 2016). “But of late,” she continues, “I have come
to have a new vantage point on these questions as they have taken a
personal turn and I find myself in an odd parallel with Bowie ─ in
human condition, if not in public prominence” (ibid.). The “personal
turn,” in human condition, was all too human, too personal, for those
of us who knew Deborah as someone living with ─ and dying from ─
metastatic cancer.

Two passages in Deborah’s Bowie piece I find particularly haunting:
“There is something about mourning that crosses a threshold, where one
must re-imagine without oneself, as if it is me who dies, if I mourn a
death” (ibid.). I was moved then, as I am still, by the distinctly
transferential nature of death and mourning in Deborah’s sentence. We
cross a “threshold” only to return to ourselves in another form. Our
relation to others ─ dead or dying ─ is bound up with that relation we
have to ourselves, a self-relation that seems at times inscrutable and
unable to survive those losses we nevertheless live through, survive.
And the second passage: “Some of the public mourning comes from those …
like me, who would not mourn ourselves if we could help it” (ibid.).
Here, then, the wish not to mourn oneself,
perhaps the inability to do so, and the unwillingness to re-imagine
life without oneself, across an impossible temporality, a future
anterior, yet with the dim acknowledgement that one is anyway helpless
because ultimately the choice is not mine or ours. These passages hold
open a strange tension: I mourn the loss of another who stands in for
me, “as if it is me who dies,” and yet I do so (publicly) in order not
to mourn myself (privately). As I’ll argue below, Deborah’s blog is
written in the tense and tension of privately mourning oneself publicly.

Deborah would write that, “Like him [Bowie] and many others, I have
found a way to turn my own precarity into words and work, albeit in my
case with a studied and distancing focus on culture rather than on
myself” (ibid.). But in a blog post just one week earlier, the
sublimating power of words and work, their promised distantiation, were
less certain: I was
asked today if I would consider writing something about the death of
David Bowie and about public mourning. This is awkward timing. The
subject of mourning has become a vexed and maybe unwelcome one for me
(11 January 2016). Her blogged words were less a meta-commentary
than a proto-commentary, the private face that precedes and subtends,
here in blog form, what would appear in print as her public face ─ or
at least one of them.

I recall a Skype conversation with Deborah at this time, when she had
been rewriting her Bowie piece based on an editor’s feedback ─ also
vexing and maybe unwelcome ─ and, feeling frustrated by the rewrite,
abandoned it and told the editor, “take it or leave it,” arguing that
hers was an original perspective and a personal one, albeit one that
had to compete with the spate of Bowie “tributes” in the public sphere.
The editor either agreed or backed down and Deborah’s original piece
was published. Even so, her blog entry was more personal, more
expansive, including these words that would not appear in the published
version: perhaps it is
not death that is repudiated, or not only death that is repudiated, but
mourning ─ the accepting of loss, its empathetic identification, its
non-heroic grievability ─ to draw inexactly on Judith Butler (11 January 2016).

These passages suggest a dual repudiation, a contrapuntal and at times
reciprocal relation between death and mourning. The cultural
repudiation of death, on the one hand, does not clearly map onto the
repudiation of mourning, on the other; after all, these two hands
belong to one body. Death does not necessarily precede mourning, and
neither death nor mourning obey the logic of cause-and-effect. Nor can
they be characterized as distinctly public and private phenomena,
respectively, for they cross and meet along moralizing borderlands,
porous as they are. And it is here that they are, at times and in time,
both mediated and mediating, indistinguishably public and private.
Deborah’s blog carves out a place in this misty terrain, neither living
nor quite dead, where the lively repudiation of one’s own death-to-come
meets the repudiation of one’s mourning oneself, and in words that
nonetheless mourn, and remain, to tremble in this tension.

To focus for a moment on the first, the cultural repudiation of death
is not in a straightforward sense the willful “denial” or “negation” of
death (in Sigmund Freud’s German, a Verneinung, translated as “negation” by the English editors of the Standard Edition).
Indeed, repudiation is a more complicated, moralizing articulation
within which some spectral “life itself” rises up as a sacred and
self-evident something, which
is steadfastly affirmed, from its most material instantiations ─
molecules, genes, blastocysts, embryos ─ to its most aestheticized and
angelic ─ breath, spirit, life-force, ch’i.
Reverent of “life,” we turn a blind eye to that death with which we are
nevertheless quietly complicit: collateral damage, social and
opportunity costs, negative externalities, and other euphemisms for
“legitimate” delivery unto death. To invoke another Freudian term,
repudiation is more akin to a “disavowal” ─ a Verleugnung
─ a pro-“life” deception or lie deeply invested in an avowed
affirmation that permits the repudiation to operate clandestinely, and
thus all the more powerfully.2

As Deborah writes in a piece we once co-authored for a special journal
issue on “bioconvergence”: “we see in the mediatized imaginary that
biology, the natural environment, and human life are subjects of ─ and
inescapably subject to ─ a technological telos” (Murray &
Steinberg, 2015, p. 125). If life has become the object and objective,
the means and the end, of everything from medicine to politics to war,
and if life is now our secular sacred something, understood in technological terms, then it saturates our mediatized imaginary, and it fosters a bioethos
─ Deborah’s coinage for the widespread cultural character and social
comportment organized around the specter of “life itself,” and in which
a discourse on death is drowned out by the cult of the cancer warrior,
the vitalizing accomplishments of biomedicine and genomics, and their
digital avatars, which might well include the veritable industry of
cancer blogs and other illness narratives. Deborah was critical of
these affirmative biodiscourses, full-mouthed (dis)avowals in and by
which the cultural repudiation of death becomes tacit commonsense. In
this respect, she was critical foremost of the manner in which “life”
is culturally curated, mediatized, and regulated, by capital, by the
state, and not least through the moral orthopedics and affirmations of
biomedicine and technoscience, including the cancer industry itself
(e.g., see Jain, 2013).

Here, among other things, Deborah’s work interrogates the formative
desire for the kind of livingness promised by (bio)technology, and
correlatively the death and precarity it disavows. As one reviewer of
her Genes and the Bioimaginary (2015) aptly states it,

"Steinberg
argues that the seductions of genetic research are based on the very
things that genes can’t explain. What makes genetic science attractive
therefore lies partly in fantasies of mastery and control of human
uncertainties: securing identity, preventing crime or illness,
fostering desired capabilities, easing suffering, righting wrongs." (11 October 2015) (citing Copland, 2015; also see Murray, 2017a)

The “bad patient” of whom Deborah writes ─ herself included ─ is one
whose body fails or who refuses the body-affective imperatives of will,
affect, and action. She refuses that life, on those
terms, and the singularizing death it renders unspeakable, shameful,
and undignified. In this failure or refusal, in this indignity or
disaffirmation, we may discern a glimmer of hope, for another life,
another death. But more on this below.

As for the second repudiation, the repudiation of mourning, I believe Deborah’s position became increasingly ambivalent, vexed.3The
problem is I don’t want to die. But am anyway. I want to stop it. I’m
fighting unconsciousness. I won’t have peace or acceptance (23 December
2016). And yet, it would be mistaken to see in the cultural repudiation of death little more than a personal repudiation of mourning
writ large. To explore the first demands a nuanced critical position
that deconstructs the disavowal, while the latter cuts closer to home
and leaves us bereft. For those in mourning ─ in,
as a state-of-being and place of disconsolate loneliness ─ it is
tempting to fall back upon social rituals and the cultural repudiation
of death, to cling avowedly to their affirmations and desires. Last
rites … rituals … that stylize what is real into just enough
regimentation and surreality that you can accept it? (10 December 2016).
We gather, pray, recite conventional words. Sometimes we execrate, call
down curses, and decry the cosmic injustice and meaninglessness of it
all. And sometimes we feel a sense of irony in this ─ something that
was never lost on Deborah. She writes:

I have found that I particularly like The Onion’s diabolically funny and contrarian treatment of the cancer culture ─ I find it bracing. I have greatly enjoyed Erin Gloria Ryan’s diatribes in Jezebel against the ‘pink crap’ of the corporatised cancer industry. And I like Clive James’ dilemma
that he has outlived his own death ─ and how awkward this is. I think I
enjoy these examples because they don’t require me to mourn. Indeed,
they assist me in the endeavour of not mourning. (Steinberg, 2016)

She
continues: “Other articles I find more bothersome. Some are those
written by doctors grieving their patients or family members grieving
the loss of loved ones. With these, I find myself in a strange
transference ─ identifying with those left behind, not the dying or
dead themselves” (ibid.).

In the “strange transference” of mourning, Deborah suggests, we
identify with those left behind, empathize with their loss, and we
mourn so as not to mourn ourselves (even as we sometimes see through
this veil). If Deborah is unwilling to mourn herself, this is both
private and public, an
unwillingness to accept her own death at the same time as an
unwillingness ─ if she could help it ─ to imagine and to inhabit the
grief of those she will leave behind. These positions are not mutually
exclusive; for Deborah, they appear to be inextricably entwined. In a
blog post titled, “harder to manage,” Deborah reports receiving an email from her oncologist: A
wrote. She is sorry more can’t be done. I don’t envy her her job. Would
be hard to treat and then lose patients. Must be hard to protect
yourself (16 December 2016). These compassionate words are
hardly a repudiation. We might say, then, that the repudiation of
mourning is the desire to protect oneself and
others from a grief that is consummately transitive ─ yours, mine,
ours. This paper theorizes Deborah’s blog as opening a (re)mediating
space, an intermediary place of sorts, somewhere in the tension between
death and mourning ─ hers, mine, ours ─ but a place, moreover, that is
not at heart repudiatory.

I am of course unable to write something Deborah would have written, as
much as I freely weave her words together with mine. I hope the change
of font, indicating Deborah’s blogged words, does nothing to diminish
the equivocation of authorial voice we intend. All authorship is
co-authorship, all writing a reckoning with death, and across these
thresholds we have refused the convention of quotation marks to offset
Deborah’s words: her voice is very much alive throughout. Deborah was uniquely positioned to comment on the mediatized cultures
of life and death. I would note a long research trajectory that
includes not only Mourning Diana (Kear & Steinberg, 1999), but earlier work, such as Made to Order: The Myth of Reproductive and Genetic Progress (Spallone & Steinberg, 1987), Bodies in Glass: Genetics, Eugenics, and Embryo Ethics
(1997), and most recently, Genes and the Bioimaginary: Science,
Spectacle, Culture (2015). As a critical media theorist and feminist
scholar of culture, she described her methodology as immersive:
I intensively embed myself in multiple media milieux in order to gain a
larger insight about the rupture points and anxieties of the larger
culture (11 January 2016). She methodologically gathered and analyzed announcements of celebrity deaths, for instance ─ I’ve been collecting them, wondering sometimes if that makes me a bit unhinged (11 January 2016)!

By contrast, and with much less humor, I have found myself decidedly
unable to immerse myself in the depressing avalanche of cancer blogs or
the scholarship on them. Apart from my own self-protection, I am
uninterested in performing a media content analysis of these blogs, nor
am I terribly interested in the critical uptake of them by academics.
In many ways, I suspect that Deborah’s blog is not dissimilar to others
that also bear witness to the quotidian realities of living with cancer
─ withering body, visits with healthcare providers, treatments, pains,
fears, indignities, rage. These blogs seem to write themselves into and
from ─ rather than simply comment on ─ the rupture points and anxieties
of a larger culture become monstrously personal. And yet, I think
Deborah would have refused the idea that the purpose of her blog was
testimonial. She disliked the publicness of such things ─ well, …
mostly. The point of
religious discourse and its relationship to power. Its jurisdictional
functions through rhetoric. Maybe the transference I seek through a
blog is just that kind of authoritative standing. Some magic, some
stardust, some claim on something, some self-elevation, some inflation
beyond my own horizons (30 October 2016).

What strikes me most about Deborah’s blog is not so much what it says,
its distillable content, but what it does not say, and how it works to
represent the unrepresentable, to make a claim on something
unclaimable, owed but not owned. Perhaps this is by now a tired trope
in cancer blog scholarship, I don’t know. But my particular interest
here lies in the chasm that opens up, at Deborah’s own suggestion,
between death and mourning, between competing or convergent
repudiations, and the (re)mediating space of her blog ─ and my
reflexive reading and writing about it, and your reading, too ─ in her
project, and ours, of re-imagining without oneself, that is, to
re-imagine another life, another death.

II. On Intermediating Places

Deborah’s blog inhabits a mournful space of self-inscrutability and in
this is an equivocal site of transference, for her as much as for this
reader. Equivocal: literally, of more than one voice, undecidable. The
express purpose of the blog was itself a recurrent thematic, and
Deborah was anxiously self-reflexive, reluctant, doubtful. Acting
on a suggestion from my friend L yesterday, it occurred to me that I
could try to make use of this erstwhile neglected semi-pointless blog
space that no one knows about to include my below-the-line comments (14
September 2016). Below-the-line comments, then, much as we find beneath online news articles: heteroglossic space (to reference Bakhtin), which Deborah imagined as cultivating a critical counter-public, of sorts, in her brief responses to the news, the tropes and rhetorics and tones of reportage, including Tory
policy on everything as it destroys democracy, education, the health
service, the welfare and rights of the many, the social contract
itself; political corruption, the gross spectacle of Trump and the
obsequious avid media machine purveying him, media framing, media
ethics, the fallacies of false equivalence, the shrinking state and the
hate (14 September 2016). These, too, represent losses,
public-private ones, and there is a mourning again here, for others she
will leave behind and abandon to the world.

In the context of Donald Trump’s election: I
can’t see redemption in any direction. What was the point of living
just to arrive here, at the end of the world, and it’s a bad end. I am
horrified at people. The selfish, cruel whatever-it-is in people that
they would even contemplate voting for such a terrible man…. I am
worried about my family and my friends. What kind of life awaits K or T
or S…. I can’t imagine what life is going to be like for girls and women, minorities, the disabled, the ill, the low-earning and poor (9 November 2016). The decay of the body politic, the ravages of neoliberalism and its sequelae ─ Neofeudalism, I once suggested to S (30 November 2016)
─ yet another of Deborah’s disarming quips ─ are all set against,
alongside, perhaps within her own body, a woman’s body, a body ravaged
by breast cancer. The
embarrassment of not being able to talk, or wash without assistance, of
having to give up the quietude and cleanliness of body that I had
before. There is no capacity to hide, dependent as I now am. It breaks
boundaries I wanted to keep intact. It is not something I want
witnessed (8 December 2016). Cancer
is like pregnancy ─ both states in which you get recast as a public
body, subject rightfully to other people’s opinions, intrusions, moral
estimations and unasked-for advice (20 October 2016). Also see Deborah’s critical perspective on the gendered and racialized faces of the cancer industry (Steinberg, 2017).

In a blog post titled, “numbers,” Deborah lamented,
I just figured out how to check and found out that three people read
this blog. I’m not sure that isn’t worse than none. And I guess feeling
that means I wish it was part of something, a conversation at large, a
performance on a larger stage. I know that the three who read it have
dialogued with it as they have written or spoken to me about it. Why
isn’t that enough? (30 October 2016). Despite her lamentations,
in Deborah’s case I do not believe the blog was intended for broad
public “consumption,” at least not at first, though it would eventually
become somewhat more public: a link appeared in an obituary published
in The Guardian (see Epstein, 2017), and now there is this essay alongside an archive of her blog.

The audience of three gradually grew, but we, this audience, would
probably not have thought of ourselves as blog “consumers,” or even
“prosumers” for that matter, although some of us would recognize
ourselves at times as contributors, when Deborah would cite an email or
refer to an ongoing conversation. Dialoguing with close friends and
family members, the blog increasingly became a question of
practicality. When the pain in Deborah’s hands left her unable to
respond to individual emails, she sometimes posted on her blog
responding to those emails in one sitting, anonymizing her friends and
family members by discreetly referring to us only by our first
initials.

Sometimes I guessed or knew who these people were, sometimes I didn’t,
but no matter, I felt connected to a wider community of interlocutors
whose precise identity mattered less to me than the fact that they were
there, listening. I found myself checking often to see if Deborah had
posted, especially in the last weeks of her life, or when I hadn’t
heard from her for a few days. There are only so many emails that can
ask, “How are you doing?” We already knew the answer and we didn’t want
to know. So the blog offered the strange kindness of not being
addressed directly, by email or by Skype, and the occasion to look with
some trepidation, when the bustle of the workday had faded, and when,
in the privacy of the screen, without the ping of an email, you might
read and reflect and respond. Add to this the time difference between
Canada and the United Kingdom, and I found myself checking before bed,
in insomniac moments, and emailing a note as Deborah’s day was
beginning, when she was at her best. I liked this idea, a new day.
Finally, the blog also found its way into her funeral service in Los
Angeles, where her blog entry, “intermediary place” (1 November 2016),
was distributed to mourners ─ some via Facebook Live ─ who might, in
their own time, read in her story a place that they too could imagine
for Deborah.

“Intermediary place”
is one of Deborah’s longer blog posts, and I suspect most carefully
edited. It was described at her funeral as “aspirational fiction,” an
imagined afterlife, perhaps, shaped by words and architectures and
peaceful spaces free of pain and full of creaturely comforts, including
companion animals and favorite foods. Those who knew Deborah will
recognize in her narrative not so much an otherworldly scene but one
that is replete with those worldly things that Deborah so loved. We
read a self-description that is familiar ─ a
favorite lightweight black ribbed knit pull-over with a high neck and
long sleeves; love tokens she remembered, a notebook and a pen; a small
medallion, enameled orange on silver; A peace sign. On the back was the
name Lola. Not her name; Her scarf was long, knit of multiple wools,
asymmetric, gold and black. With gold fringes. My mother made me this,
she remembered (1 November 2016).

The intermediary place itself, the way station, as she called it, is indeed aspirational, yet homey and full of familiar things. There
were occasional tables with glass bowls and vases. Apples in one bowl,
foxglove sprays in a clear glass vase, sunflowers. And orchids. There
were framed prints ─ Miró, she recognized, Lichtenstein, de Lempicka (1
November 2016). Her personal quarters here are also well appointed, with kitchen, living room, bedroom, and bathroom. The granite was oro stupendo.
She knew the design. She had picked it out. The floor tiles were smoke
black semi-glossed slate; she knelt down. The tiles were warm; a small
beautifully appointed black gloss kitchenette … small cupboards holding
pots and pans, bakeware…. There was a Dualit kettle and toaster on the
worktop … a small set of white dishes and bowls, clear glasses, a set
of nested glass mixing bowls, a small silver cafetière next to a vacuum-lipped blue porcelain coffee urn (1 November 2016). And as she crawls into bed, weary from her journey ─ A
small brown dog with melting eyes and silky fur looked up to her with
begging intent. Come up, she said patting the bed. The dog leapt up in
a graceful arc and dived under the covers, laying itself against her
back and sinking quickly into soft dog snores (1 November 2016). Two days later she would write: I am
glad it occurred to me that I might build worlds that give me comfort.
And that I can compose out of the beautiful things I care about (3
November 2016).

It is not simply the yearning for home, for a body in a time and place
of peace. It is written in the third person ─ at a distance from yet
opening onto, invoking, that person, that place. Two weeks earlier she
had imagined her own burial, writing: But
let me take some things that mean something with me…. I told G that I
want to be dressed in something I like…. I would like a notebook and a
pen. Tokens from loved ones. Some food. Something to keep warm.
Something sensible to walk on, but still beautiful…. Someday, I would
like Lola [my dog] with me. I wish I could have her name tag so she can
find me (17 October 2016).

The intermediary place is not, above all, a transitional place filled
with “transitional” objects as the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott (1971)
theorizes them, nor is it the generative potential space that he
envisages between the analyst and analysand. Deborah would not have
overlooked this detail; indeed, she had mentioned object relations in
an interceding blog post (24 October 2016). Although the traveler in
Deborah’s story is in transit, journeying from one life to another,
Deborah did not write “transitional,” and settled instead ─ rather
decidedly, I think ─ on “intermediary.” I’ve
never believed in any one thing or another about death. Assertions that
death is a journey, or a better place, or a place at all ─ haven’t been
particularly persuasive to me. Maybe it is mawkish to think these
things (17 October 2016). The fictional place and those objects in it, much like the blog itself, mediate
by building a virtual world on a social media platform, composed out of
real things and events ─ not all of them beautiful, certainly.

I cannot help but read this intermediary place as synecdochal of
Deborah’s blog as a whole. The blog itself is an intermediary place, a
multifaceted world given voice in a mediatized “third person,” a
subjectivity of sorts, situated between the one who writes and the one
who reads. It is a place where anything might still be possible, some magic, some stardust.
If Deborah projects herself there, into that world, that intermediary
place, so do we; the world takes on an ethos, speaks to us and back to
her, and acts on both. In psychoanalytic literature building on the
work of Thomas H. Ogden (1994), this might be theorized as an “analytic
third,” a therapeutic agency independent of the patient-analyst dyad.
In the psychotherapeutic scene the analytic third represents a third
subject, an unconscious co-creation of both, and a particular site of
transference and countertransference for each, respectively. The third
takes on a life of its own and stands in tension with the patient and
the analyst, and is an active site of reflection that is independent
yet has no meaning beyond the relationship of the two. The third is an
intermediary, much like Deborah’s blog was for her and for those of us
reading it.

The feminist psychoanalyst, Jessica Benjamin, in describing the
analytic third “emphasize[s] the reciprocal, mutually influencing
quality of interaction between subjects, the confusing traffic of
two-way streets” (2004, p. 6). Benjamin rejects the object relations
view that one person is subject, the other object ─ that one does, the
other is done to ─ or for our purposes here, that one speaks and the
other is spoken, or spoken to. Benjamin writes:

To
the degree that we ever manage to grasp two-way directionality, we do
so only from the place of the third, a vantage point outside the two….
My interest is not in which ‘thing’ we use, but in the process of
creating thirdness — that is, in how we build relational systems and
how we develop the intersubjective capacities for such co-creation. (p.
7)

It is perhaps no surprise that Deborah admired Jessica Benjamin’s work.
Her blog, then, builds a relational system, and is a process of
creating thirdness, a vantage point that is occupied neither by she who
writes nor she who reads, but by both, and by creating a capacious
space of intersubjectivity. It is “agentic” without quite relying on
the familiar coordinates of the liberal subject, a subjective “me” or
an objective “you.”

The blog’s intermediary place is nevertheless not a utopia, a placeless
place; rather, I’d suggest it is what Michel Foucault has called a
heterotopia, an other place.
Tellingly, Foucault uses the metaphor of the mirror to describe this
phenomenon. In one respect, the mirror is indeed a utopia: “In the
mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space
that opens up behind the surface” (1984). But from another vantage,

it
is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality,
where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy….
Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from
the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the
glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes
toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. (ibid.)

Much like the “agency” of the analytic third, we might think of the
heterotopia as a place that fosters the recognition of our
interdependence. It exerts a sort of counteraction; it is a relational
system, and co-creational. If Deborah’s blog is in some sense a
utopian, unreal, and virtual space, it is also a heterotopic place,
which intermediates or “mirrors” precisely because it is tethered to us
and to those people and things we hold dear.

These passages on Foucault’s heterotopia were in mind when I emailed Deborah to respond to her blog post, “last edits,” which had described Deborah’s experience of watching a video of herself at her book launch in the summer of 2016. The
thing that I found myself improbably liking was how I came across,
compromised voice and all. I seemed nice. And my comments were good.
Well-chosen words. Watchable. It’s not what I expected. Or how I
remember it exactly. I found myself thinking as I was watching it, what
a shame she is on her way out (21 October 2016).

Caught off-guard, I had sobbed when I read her last line: to read ─ and
to watch, as it were ─ Deborah watching herself, and reflecting on
that, and then for her to close her post here in the thirdness of the
third person, “she.” I found myself lost in these reflections, unsure
what to feel, between “I,” “you,” “she,” and “us.” I was grieving and
selfishly aggrieved. Fuck cancer and its parade of pink crap! Was this
what it felt like to mourn? If so, at the very least mourning is no
solitary pursuit, and certainly not mine to repudiate. Mourning
together, even at a distance, somehow eroded the repudiation
co-creatively; the feeling became no less disconsolate, but we were
together avowing a disavowal, and by sharing it exposing just a little
of its clandestine powers, its loneliness. In Benjamin’s terms, I
understand this as “a certain letting go of the self”: “the third is
that to which we surrender, and thirdness is the intersubjective mental
space that facilitates or results from surrender” (2004, p. 7).

I emailed Deborah, telling her that her blog post had made me think of
mirrors, another image of ourselves, a reflection that looks outward,
an image that does not settle, that unsettles, and does not stop moving
between that mirror image, what we see of ourselves, how we wish to be
seen, and others seeing us, in a way that brings us back to ourselves
reflectively, across that threshold, and in another form. As a child, I
told her, I was captivated by standing between two mirrors, seeing
myself seeing myself, almost to infinity. An early memory, this, and
probably the apogee of my career as a media scholar! A mirror stage
quite unlike what Jacques Lacan describes, where that mirror is
supposed to consolidate my corporeal boundaries, my body-ego. Rather, I
felt myself opened up, unconsolidated, more in a curious than
frightening way—a mise en abîme where the abîme, the abyss, is not empty or lonely, but full of infinite reflections, full of wonder, a heterotopia.

Deborah responded in blog form. S
wrote to me about mirrors. His thoughts were compelling. The double
mirror to infinity. The single mirror to the walls we might erect
between self and self. The strange abyss, into which we might watch
ourselves fall that might nonetheless be replete with something. I was
very moved by this reflection on my reflections. I did always want to
say meaningful things. I am concerned about being morose, self-serving,
trite. What stopped me from writing in this space in the first
instance, and then stopped me from circulating it when I did start
using it…. How do you stay in conversations, when everything is
conspiring to monologues, to solipsism, to mirrors only of one mind?
(23 October 2016). I cannot be certain there is a connection, but this was the day Deborah wrote an email of enquiry to Catalyst, copied and posted on her blog, stating her interest in contributing to the special issue you are now reading.

Morose, self-serving, trite: fears of narcissism, of self-entitlement appear frequently in Deborah’s blog. She struggled with feelings of embarrassment,
by the bag of bones I’ve become, by the way I choke on my own saliva;
loss of dignity … my inclination is to withdraw (6 December 2016). Yet her blog was an intermediating force, on her, on us. I
realized today that I must ensure I’ve saved this blog in some other
format, including printed out, so it won’t be suddenly lost. I don’t
know why I think it’s important … to leave something behind, an
imprint, an imprimatur, a hauntological artefact. To say I was here.
And that it made some difference. Romantic narcissism, I can see that.
But it is a deep feeling too and I can’t repudiate it with criticism or
scorn, or even simple self-awareness (30 November 2016). Deborah
had imagined this essay as engaging new media ecologies of death, of
mourning, and troubling the distinctions between private and public ─
all things her blog does. “And also the way self-mourning now asserts
into a blogosphere,” she wrote to me. “These are both communal and
narcissistic times we live in. We are private and public at the same
time” (personal email, 12 November 2016). In a blog post titled, “this is the way the world ends,” Deborah wrote: The
world does not end with a whimper. It ends in conflagration, drowned at
sea in the search for a haven, crawled up on banks of rock or sand or
mud, with no prospects, holed up in bed with the drapes closed, racked
with pain and hopelessness, in the crass bombast of a demagogue [Trump]
turned now on flesh to flesh out a terrible world (24 October 2016).
From a dying body increasingly disabled and in pain, her blog
nevertheless declares war on these losses, these endings, as a third
voice between the singular body and the body politic, even as these are
woven together, each a metaphor for the other, the private, the public.

But there are times for war, she would write. To
be pacific in the face of the end of security, rights, equality,
justice, hope. That is not peace. This is not a time for refuge in
established routines, or pat wisdoms that no longer relate to the
reality of the world. And by the way, those established routines, at
the least, were ugly compromises that pushed back the parameters of
acceptability. We’ve been shrinking violets over years of violations,
pretending that compliance will stave something off. But it didn’t.
Appeasement is a weakness, a stance of fear, and at times, it is a
stance of complacency, or privilege, or the denial that comes with
those (17 November 2016).

Times of war afford little time for goodbyes; there is work to be done, and a debt to those to come, to the future.

III. On Goodbyes

On
goodbyes. I don’t know. I feel the same as you. I want to hold to
people I care about forever. I don’t want to say goodbye to myself
either…. Much of the time I just wish it was done. To go to sleep and
not wake up so I could stop suffering and stop being afraid…. The
district nurse thinks I’m on the way out for real now. I can’t tell. A,
my oncologist, when I asked her, said that I would be able to tell when
it was happening. But who knows. I think we all have to live in the
indefinite conversation. What else is there? It makes time easier to
bear. And it’s part of what is hopeful about life, and politics too (30
November 2016). Above, an email to me replying to an email to
her, remediated as a blog post, and here again in these pages, on your
screen, in your hands.

Death’s in the goodbye, announced in and as language ─ intermediating
places, indefinite conversations ─ words that resound and remain
despite the loss of a “you” or a “me,” attesting to that loss without
quite ceding on it. Words are tokens of exchange, intermediaries, tokens
that promise reunifications, or the means to sing or say, without
choking or gasping for breath. Some reminder of what I did. When I was
here (17 October 2016). If this blogged, intermediary place is
a repudiation of mourning, it transmits none of the certainty of those
repudiations of which Deborah was so critical: no phantasmatic
certainty of “life” arises there,no willing life so as to have it, no quid pro quo.
On the contrary, we enter onto a place of non-teleological mourning,
neither repudiatory nor affirmational. And, if there is a transference
onto the third voice ─ hers but less hers, and less mine, than ours ─
the transference resists identitarian politics, and does not permit a
“me” or a “you” to stand in or speak for the other or to usurp this
harrowing, hallowing, hollering place between us.

The intermediating place of the blog forms part of the transforming
ecologies of mourning and the place(s) of dying, to recall Deborah’s
words. I take these to be media ecologies, and the ways they constitute
and sometimes contest the “proper” or “expected” destitute place(s) of
dying in our culture, from deathbeds to hospitals ─ those very real
sites that contain and constrain in the ways that they do ─ but also
“place” in a deep ecological sense, as metaphor for those
interconnected lives and losses that define and gather us, and that
constitute the larger scene on which words are spoken, circulated, and
inhabited as worlds across indefinite conversations. Wor(l)ds that
permit us to imagine a passage, a movement, and that do not simply
contain or constrain. I
like the way station. I like the textures I invented. I like the way it
feels to be there. It suggests a direction without being one. It feels
like movement even if it doesn’t mean going anywhere (7 November 2016). This is virtual, and yet it is not. Indefinite conversations: part of what is hopeful about life, and politics too.
As a collocated artifact, a series of moments gathered as one static
document, Deborah’s blog today is a much different text than it was in
and across its own time. For those who read active cancer blogs
regularly, as I did Deborah’s, there is often great anxiety, a fear of
refreshing the link, a fear of finding a new entry, but also a fear of
not finding one. While the end might have been known as a disconsolate
fact, an inevitability, in the life of Deborah’s blog time unfolded in
and across the written word.Slowly, and at times cruelly so. Can’t leave fast enough. Close down.
Get away (31 December 2016). And here I still am, trapped in a chair,
barely moving, hands inexorably contorting to their own calamity.
Nothing I can do now. All the things I wanted to be throughout my life
were active. Poet, scholar, activist, actor, director, editor, artist,
designer. Maker of things. Now ending like this. Except it’s not
ending. Why not? It needs to end. I need to end (1 January 2017).
Feeling so much worse. But on and on it goes. No more energy for
things. Goodbyes. Good wishes. None left in me (20 January 2017). As a gathered artifact, however, we begin to read at the end, with last words, and scroll back in time to reconstruct the dénouement.
A historical record. Not nothing in itself but nothing at all like it
was for those who read and write in real-time. I lack the poetic skills
to bring her blog to life; I don’t have the heart to relive it; and I
would not bring Deborah back to relive it either. All the time. I’m angry. I’m aggrieved (11 December 2016). No. No.

I have begun to gain a better understanding of Foucault’s enigmatic
claim, that speech begins after death. This is at first a highly
counterintuitive proposition: after all, is not life the condition of
speech? “Speech,” Foucault says, “isn’t only a kind of transparent film
through which we see things, not simply the mirror of what is and what
we think. Speech has its own consistency, its own thickness and
density, its way of functioning” (Foucault & Bonnefoy, 2013, pp.
36–37). Here speech is a “transparent film,” very thin, but also a
density, a thickness. Speech does not “mirror” reality perfectly; it is
in this sense “heterotropic” (if I can coin this word) ─ both a
heterotopia, an other place, and a transitivity, a tropological movement and intermediation, even if it doesn’t mean going anywhere.
Foucault parses this paradox in the following way: “Naturally, it seems
to me that I could talk about the things that are quite close to us,
but on condition that there exists, between those very close things and
the moment in which I’m writing, an infinitesimal shift, a thin film through which death has entered”
(p. 43; emphasis added). This is a recognition of the intimate
proximity and transitivity of death in the act of writing, and perhaps
speaking (he uses these words almost interchangeably in this text).
Foucault shares in this moment more than he might care to admit with
psychoanalytic theory, and some philosophy of language, which
understands language ─ writing or speech ─ as predicated on a death of
sorts. That is, death or simply loss are the necessary conditions of
language, because if there were no absence, no lack, no rupture with
being ─ even temporarily ─ we would have no need of words, and no need
to turn elsewhere, tropologically.

Words stand in for what is absent or hidden, and they try to represent
what is lost, to represent the unrepresentable, as a mere sign or
symbol, a token. Signs substitute as it were for being, and open for us
a world of symbolic meaning that is cut off from the Real, to borrow
Lacan’s term. But words also have their own agency, and create worlds,
textures, places that are unreal or imaginary, and that dwell less on
what is than on what might or ought to be. And we must not forget, too,
that writing or speech addresses someone, an addressee, an other ─
actual or potential ─ who might read or hear across time and distance.
Speech is indeed “heterotropic,” the tropic turn and return of an
address, yours and mine, mine in yours, the other irreducible to the
selfsame, and vice versa. And this is true even if my addressee is me
myself, as it always is to some extent, inscrutable as I am to myself,
bound up with and through my attachments to others. In Foucault’s
terms: “We can never reach the end of language through speech, no
matter how long we imagine it to be. This inexhaustibility of language,
which always holds speech in suspense in terms of a future that will
never be completed, is another way of experiencing the obligation to
write” (p. 66). I find something hopeful in this obligation, in what is
owed but not owned, and in the inexhaustibility of language and its
indefinite conversations; also, in the agency of language, which
carries me beyond a “me” or a “you,” where the subject who speaks, as
much as the addressee, tremble and are cradled in the murmurs of an
intermediary place.

How does this, my theoretic account, figure into a feminist politics of
the body-subject? But this is not (just) theory: if the singular body
and the body politic stand in a tropological relation, each troping the
other, spoken, addressed, in turns and returns, it is also a profoundly
material one, in other wor(l)ds. But words matter. And in so many respects, are matter (11 December 2016).
As we know only too well, crises in the body politic have profoundly
material effects on individual bodies, which are beholden, if not
hostage, to the institutions and infrastructures and social services
responsible for delivering care. Deborah once again: “Austerity is
nothing if not a harbinger of social excommunication and lonely death”
(Steinberg, 2016). In the context of a feminist politics, I think back
to some of those indefinite conversations with Deborah, and lively
debates concerning her concept of self-sovereignty (also see Shildrick
& Steinberg, 2015). Self-sovereignty: A problematic concept,
Deborah wrote on her blog. And
yet what else is there that expresses one’s right to determination over
one’s own body? The inalienable right over the disposition of one’s own
self and life, vis-à-vis someone else’s interest, whether that is
intrusion, or exploitation, or ownership, or life and death, medical
treatment or not? (20 October 2016).

My own concern with this term, sovereignty, is its history and
alignment with liberal conceptions of “autonomy” and the ways this
latter has been deployed by patriarchal politics and paternalistic
(bio)ethics. “Sovereignty” seems to me to cling to an outdated
language, conceding a politics that polices in advance the boundaries
of autonomy, and what it might mean to make a valid ─ legible or legal,
rational or agentic ─ claim from this ostensibly autonomous
subject-position or “self.” It reduplicates violence, in my view. In
the words of Deborah’s friend, Margrit Shildrick, bioethics, like
medicine, is a disciplinary power: “[T]he discipline has effectively
duplicated the master discourse and maintained the split between a
secure sense of the transcendent self as moral agent, and a more or
less unruly body that must be subjected to its dictates” (Shildrick,
2005, p. 3). Deborah did not disagree. And yet. She was right: how else might we express one’s right to determination over one’s own body, one’s life, one’s death?

The fallacies of
individuation, sovereign selfhood apart from others, a denial of the
interdependencies of bodies and lives that are in fact the human
condition. Who is an island, really? And yet. I think of the ways in
which secrecy ─ call it discretion, call it hiding, call it dim
lighting my own lights ─ has dominated much of my own life. The sense
of obligation that has driven it. The embarrassments in its wake. S is
right that shame and guilt are cruddy, cruel oppressors. But even so
they are embedded in the fabric of so much (8 December 2016). In an act of self-sovereignty, Deborah had signed an advance directive for her medical care.
M from palliative care told me that she was concerned that one of my
provisions in the directive is not legal in the UK. The one about
terminal sedation. Yes I am aware of that, I told her. But it is what I
wish for. The law is wrong. And I protest it. And it stays in (20
October 2016).

When the time came, Deborah’s wish was not honored, it could not be, by law: I
asked for Propofol sedation … she said it was illegal in UK. This is
illogical. I didn’t say kill me with it…. C said, well, the law is
trying to protect people from feeling pressure to die. Well fuck that
because it is fine with forcing people to live in suffering. Why is
that pressure OK? (23 December 2016).

THEY GET OFFENDED AT MY
INTERROGATION OF THEIR ILLOGICS. AND ARE FRUSTRATED BY MY FIGHTING TO
KEEP MYSELF IN MY OWN TERMS INSTEAD OF GRATEFULLY SUBMITTING AS A
COMPLIANT PATIENT. THEY WANT TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT WHAT THEY ARE DOING.
AND I MAKE THAT DIFFICULT (24 December 2016). It would be better if I were a dog or a horse. Someone would stop this (8 December 2016).

Yet even here, Deborah felt the obligation to write, to speak. These passages were and remain difficult for me to read. In our indefinite conversations I
had argued (feebly, I confess, full of hesitation) from the perspective
of a feminist ethics of care, premised on the fact that we are, in
birth as in death, ultimately relational beings, nonautonomous, and
interdependent (see Murray, 2017b). The agony, and the injustice, is
that one is forced to concede the “master discourse” in order to be
heard, to make a claim on its
terms, to be judged by medico-legal institutions, the court of public
opinion, and by those microfascists deputized to act in their name,
which becomes yours despite yourself. The problem is, it would seem,
that the entire discourse ─ liberal human rights discourse included ─
is flawed, based on false premises, and held by established powers. And
yet the power of the people, and of a populism that claims to fight
established powers, also offers little refuge beyond social media
trial-by-tweetstorm. A feminist ethics must resist the populist
seduction too.

Writing in the wake of the Trump election, Deborah looked toward the
struggles ahead. I suspect that everything will have change. The music.
The films. The books. The conversations (25 November 2016). An
ecological shift in consciousness, a reckoning with misogyny, racism,
warmongering, and the alt-right ghouls who know very well how to
reverse-engineer algorithms and populate our social media screens with
their content. Despite our debates, and in my own desire to honor her
self-sovereignty, I don’t think Deborah would mind that I close by
saying that as much as her blog was and remains an extension of
herself, she was not, and is not, sovereign over it. It inhabits, opens
onto and speaks from, another place. And it is not the place of the
populist imaginary, not subject rightfully to other people’s opinions, intrusions, moral estimations and unasked-for advice (20 October 2016), of which Deborah was so critical.

The “subject” of Deborah’s blog is both a private and a public one,
narcissistic yet profoundly communal, wrought in language that refers
to “you” and “me,” what is “yours” and “mine,” but in and from a place
that is, moreover, ours. In this, it is almost free from the claims of
bodily self-sovereignty; its body is virtual, subtle, but for all this
no less real. A digital body politic, if you will. It is not that
self-sovereignty is irrelevant there, in this intermediary place;
rather, it is, perhaps, that place without which any claim to bodily
sovereignty, to a “me” and a “you,” no longer makes sense, no longer
has purchase. It suggests a very different ecology, a future that calls
us despite the diminishing places of care in a culture that repudiates
death even as it is hell-bent on delivering it, often to those whose
self-sovereignty was never more than a cruel deceit, a false form of
popular “empowerment.” In a radical reading, one I would close with
tentatively, this intermediary place ─ and others like it ─ is
primordial, originary, and cultivates a relationality from which our
sense of “me” and “you” derive, and upon which they depend.
It is owed but not owned, and yes, this subverts a certain Enlightenment
philosophy of the subject, it undermines a liberal ethics founded in
the fetish of autonomy, and would re-imagine, if we could ─ and this
“we” is nonnegotiable, a beginning ─ a different life, a different
death, for all of us who find ourselves in places between.
Acknowledgements

Stuart Murray would like to thank Gershon Sillins and Debbie Epstein for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes1
An unedited transcript of Deborah’s blog,
https://darkcloudblog.wordpress.com, is archived in PDF format and
accompanies this essay. In keeping with Deborah’s wishes, throughout
this essay I have made minor editorial corrections and added
capitalization at the beginning of sentences. Her blogged words, woven
together with mine, appear in a different font, followed by the date of
the blog entry: I
seem to be learning all over again how to type, this time with no
hands, just single claws and I have to watch the keys. I have to go
back again and again to make corrections (21 October 2016).

2
On the psychoanalytic distinction between Verneinung (“negation”) and Verleugnung
(“disavowal”), which I invoke loosely here, see Laplanche &
Pontalis (1973, pp. 261–263 and 118–120, respectively). I see parallels
between Freudian disavowal ─ originally the repudiation of woman’s lack
of a penis, when subjects nevertheless report seeing one there ─ and
the repudiation of death where one fetishizes “life” as phallic
virility, and which covers over the reality of loss.

3
I should note here that the repudiation of mourning is not the failure
to mourn, but might be seen as arising in response to mourning and the
feelings that accompany it. In this sense it is not what Freud (1957)
describes as melancholia, where the lost object is introjected,
installed in the ego as a narcissistic identification, and becomes
there a super-egoic agency that morally castigates the ego. The words
“melancholy” and “melancholia” never appear in Deborah’s blog.

Stuart J. Murray is
Professor and Canada Research Chair in Rhetoric and Ethics in the
Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University in
Ottawa, Canada. His books include Critical Interventions in the Ethics of Healthcare: Challenging the Principle of Autonomy in Bioethics (with Dave Holmes); The Ethics of Care: Moral Knowledge, Communication, and the Art of Caregiving (with Alan Blum); Radical Sex Between Men: Assembling Desiring-Machines (with Dave Holmes and Thomas Foth); and he is completing a manuscript, tentatively titled, The Living From The Dead: Disaffirming Biopolitics.

Deborah Lynn Steinberg was a Professor of Gender, Culture and
Media Studies in the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick,
and an Associate Lecturer at the Open University, United Kingdom. Her
books include Bodies in Glass: Genetics, Eugenics, Embryo Ethics; Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of Grief (with Adrian Kear); Blairism and the War of Persuasion: Labour’s Passive Revolution (with Richard Johnson); and Genes and the Bioimaginary: Science, Spectacle, Culture.